Arabian Nights

This 1943 retelling of the classic Arabian Nights tales is a very visually busy and sometimes confused story. The thing that seems to be the most off to me, or perhaps this was intentional, in the sections that are set in the “real world”, aka not in a tale, world seems flat, things in the distance feel like they’re painted on the wall like in a play instead of really being off in the distance. I think on the characters, the varied line weight really helped give the characters an amount of form and detail, even though they seem to be anatomically exaggerated. The main character Schehere’Zadem, for instance, has an overly long neck and body. The use of flat color over the whole piece also seems to flatten the space contained in the frame as well, the thing that seemed to make the characters pop was the use of saturation, less saturation in the background and more saturation in the characters. There isn’t much in the way of shading and the only way the piece seems to show depth is in taking away detail or blacking out a form entirely to make it seem far away.